To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

During the romantic era, the notion that individuality represented the source
of all new developments in the art world came to have enormous cultural
influence in the West. Rather than seeing poets, writers, visual artists,
composers and performers as temporally bound people working within (and often
against) the bounds of their own cultures and prison-houses of language to
produce their work, the romantic era tended to view artists as visionaries who
dove into the depths of their individuality to present new, personal works that
spoke of their vision of the world. It is no wonder then that the figure of the
genius – a person who was seen as possessing an distinctive personality and
mind that presented them with idiosyncratic visions different from those of
everyone else’s – grew to figure so prominently in romantic concepts of art,
music and literature.

Even now, in the early twenty-first century,
the romantic notion of art, with its ideas of singular authorship and vision,
continues to have a great pull over our contemporary imaginations. Perhaps
nowhere is this more apparent than in the acclaim given to individual producers
of so-called ‘high culture’. It is common to praise people as great authors,
artists and poets – even geniuses – while forgetting that what we call
‘greatness’ is not just the result of natural skill and vision, but also hard
work, learning, practice and honed craftsmanship. The flip side of this respect
for the individual artist is that our society tends to place less value on
artistic products born out of cooperative acts of creation. For instance,
commercial publishers tend to shy away from co-authored books, and academia, at
least in the United States, tends to place less weight upon co-authored books
or (even worse) translations. In the visual art market, people assume, a piece
of art is less interesting and valuable if it is not the sole product of a
single individual. It is precisely for this reason that agents behind many
commercially successfully visual artists who do rely on helpers tend to gloss
over this fact in marketing. (For instance, it is common to see exhibitions of
Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami which do not even mention the fact
that each of these artists hands off their ideas to crews of loyal workers who
execute them.)

Still, when one stops to think, what pieces of art are not collaborative in
nature? Architecture requires not just an architect, but engineers and
labourers to produce. Cinema involves not just a director and actors, but often
casts of hundreds, if not thousands of others. Music involves a collaborative
effort between composer and performers, even though sometimes they might live
hundreds of years apart. Artists often rely upon advice and help of technicians,
friends, or fellow artists, and even when they do not, it is still the gallery
or museum curator who determines the ways an artistic work is seen and the
value bestowed upon it. Writing usually involves intimate collaborations with
editors. Not only do they do much of the final shaping of contents; in the end,
editors are the ones who determine what exactly will be seen by the world. In
addition, postmodern theory has, at least in the academy, started to change the
ways people see the relationship between the individualism and art. Focusing on
the flow of ideas and power relationships that structure a work,
poststructuralism emphasises those aspects of creative acts that are beyond the
control of the individual creator. If anything, the creator is only one focus
within a network of historical and linguistic forces – one operation within the
parameters of complex semiotic systems that predate the artist him- or
herself.

If art is necessarily collaborative, then perhaps it is incumbent upon us to shift
radically the ways that we think about ownership in the linguistic and visual
arts. Perhaps it would make sense for us, as readers and consumers of culture,
to celebrate collaboration between poets, novelists, translators, visual
artists, musicians and performers. Perhaps it would make sense for us to seek
out genres of artistic production that highlight and celebrate collaboration,
not just because they present us with exciting, fresh flows of ideas, but also
because they do the important work of unsettling traditional, conservative
notions of intellectual proprietorship and truth.

Renshi
as collaborative poetry

The argument above is a roundabout way of arguing for the value of
collaborative poetic endeavours. Poetry has been a field that has been especially
prone to the romantic cult of individuality, no doubt in large part due to the
ideal that the poet represents a sort of ‘seer’. (In fact, this idea of
poet-as-seer has roots at least as far back as Greek thought, but certainly, it
took on new force in the romantic era.) Nonetheless, we should not allow this
to eclipse our appreciation for other kinds of poetry that has been created
through interesting and innovative forms of collaboration, especially
considering how important such collaborations has been in the history of poetry
around the world.

One of the most exciting, dynamic forms of contemporary collaborative poetic
production today isrenshior
“linked poetry” – the modern offshoot of a far older verse form known as renga
(“linked songs”), which was popular in medieval and early modern Japan. In
renga, poets would cooperate to write poems with fixed metrical patterns of 5-7
and 5-7-7 sound units. One poet would compose a handful of lines in these
metres, then the next would pick up on themes in that opening verse to comprise
another segment, and so on. In each turn, the poet would move in a slightly
different direction. Although it would still honour the spirit of the earlier
verse by drawing upon some theme or image in it, it would have its own unique
focus or message. In his study of renga, the Japanese literary scholar Earl
Miner wrote that in renga “no stanza has a continuing semantic connection, as a
discrete poetic unit, with anything other than its predecessor and successor.
We can choose if we like to consider it in itself. We must consider each as a
fresh view of its predecessor, which it completes. And we must consider it also
as the basis of the next stanza, which alters it in making a new poetic unit.
It has no such connection beyond.”(1) With each verse building upon the
previous one, the sequence continues until reaching a predetermined number.
Still, the poets were not entirely free to do whatever they liked at each turn.
Within renga, there was a series of complex rules that governed when and how
different thematic elements were introduced, for example, images of the moon,
the seasons, or other elements of nature.

In 1969, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, then living in Paris, brought together a group of four poets
to compose a series of linked verses based loosely on the rules of traditional
Japanese verse. His partners wereJacques Roubaudfrom France,
Edoardo Sanguineti from Italy,
and Charles Tomlinson from Britain.
After a fun and intense week of writing, the results were translated into all
of the languages of the participants. In a nod to the metrical traditions of
Japanese renga, the participants wrote their work in fragments that would, when
pieced together, form a series of sonnets. This innovative way of collaborating
caused a small stir in the poetic world of the time, suggesting the exciting
possibilities for a new kind of poetic production. Soon afterward, these poems
were translated into Japanese and, ironically, helped give birth to a new style
of poetry in Japan
called renshi.

The charactershiof
the word renshi often refers more specifically to the kind of poetry that
developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that did not
necessarily adhere to traditional strictures on length, rhythm, and diction. In
other words, renshi differs from renga in that it is written in shi, which are
relatively flexible in terms of content and poetic rules. Participants in a
renshi session typically agree beforehand on the total number of verses and the
number of lines each person will contribute per round. Each contribution should
play off, but not adhere too closely to, the one that came before it. In other
words, there should be a cognitive leap between each verse, but the verse
should not be so far that it is completely unrelated. As a result, the renshi
grows organically, moving in new directions, treating new subjects, and
resisting attempts to pin it down too closely to one ideology or theme.

One might think of renshi perhaps as being somewhat akin to a jazz
improvisation. Several players appear on stage at once, gathered for a single
purpose, but the players take turns performing their solos on different
instruments – usually, in the case of renshi, different types and styles of
poetic writing. The first ‘performer’ might present his work using one
instrument – verses written in a terse, avant-garde style perhaps – then steps
into the background to let the next ‘performer’ step forward and take the
stage. Within the first riff are the themes to which the second ‘performer’
creates her improvisation, which she performs using a slightly different style
– perhaps verses with a more narrative quality. In a sense, the first
‘performer’ is not entirely silent through the second verse; by providing the
themes for the second verse, it is almost as if he is performing the
accompaniment in the background. Where renshi differs from jazz improvisations
is that jazz typically involves a return to certain pre-agreed-upon key
signatures and melodies, culminating in a sense of recognition and excitement
when those musical elements come round again. Renshi, however, continually
moves outward, treating new ideas and themes, not necessarily returning to a single
point of return unless the poets desire to bring it home in such a way. In a
sense, the kind of collaboration that takes place in renshi is always making
new forays into the unknown.

Because renshi shifts from voice to voice – ‘instrument’ to ‘instrument’ in the
analogy above – renshi may seem avant-garde and perhaps even perplexing to
readers who are used to poetry written with a single overarching message or
voice. Reading
renshi requires a mindset different than reading poetry penned by a single person.
Like older forms of Japanese linked verse, renshi do not have integral ‘plots’
that run throughout the entire work. They are “linked in a continuity at each
point of juncture but are otherwise discontinuous in plot”.(3) Just as
the authorship shifts from person to person at the point of juncture between
poems, so the authorial voice can shift, thus changing perspective radically.
Rather than considering the work overall as a single, unified work that
represents the product of a single artistic drive, the reader should take each
nugget of verse – each little jazz-like riff – as its own little world. Each is
separate and could be considered on its own, but it is more interesting when
seen in relation to what comes before and after it, rather in the way that
clusters of stars are more interesting when one sees them as constellations.
Renshi are not what Roland Barthes would have called “readerly texts” – ones
that provide all the information necessary for readers to consume them in a
passive, unthinking way; instead, renshi are “writerly texts” – writing with
gaps and suggestive pauses that invite the reader to become involved by making
their own sense out of the work. In this sense, renshi do not just involve
creative collaboration between poets, but also between the text and reader.

In the decades since Paz organised his now famous series of linked verses, the
Japanese poet Makoto Ōoka has served as a major champion of renshi. He and the
poets associated with his poetry magazineOar(Kai)
have organised many renshi sessions with poets from Japan
and around the world, many of which have been published in book form in
Japanese and other languages.(4) In recent years, the prominent poet Shuntarō
Tanikawa has taken up the lead in promoting renshi in Japan. Participating and organising
renshi events through the country, Tanikawa has used his enormous popularity to
foster new interest in the possibilities of decentered, collaborative verse.
Meanwhile, internet and wiki technology have made it easy for poets to collaborate
even when they are far apart. As a result of all of these factors, there is
more interest than ever in the production of renshi in Japan.

In March 2010, four prominent Japanese poets, Shuntarō Tanikawa,Hiromi Itō, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto andWakako Kaku, plus the well-known American poet
Jerome Rothenberg, met in the southern Japanese castle-town of Kumamoto for
three days of writing renshi. The poets had gathered together from their homes
in three nations – Japan, America, and Germany – and because they were writing
in both Japanese and English, I also joined them as a translator to help render
the poems and facilitate communication.(5) As the sabakite or ‘judge’ who would
organise the progress of the renshi, Shuntarō Tanikawa set the rule that each
poet could write up to ten lines per round, and he developed a system of
rotation so that each poet would not follow any other poet more than twice
during the course of the sequence.

Because all were eager to embark upon this project, the poets began exchanging
verses via e-mail even before meeting. As a result, many of the earliest verses
in the sequence are full of excited optimism about the prospect of coming to Kumamoto to write. Hiromi
Itō started off the sequence with a four-line quotation from a local, sacred
song preserved in the annual festival at the nearby Aso Shrine. These lines
describe the singers’ eagerness to put their voices together in song – a fine
introduction to a series of verses written by poets coming together from around
the world. Shuntarō Tanikawa followed with a celebratory verse containing
pastoral images children playing as visitor’s words flourish nearby. Jerome
Rothenberg’s verse picked up on an image in Tanikawa’s verse of an underground
world associated with the dead and linked it to the idea of sheol, the Jewish
underworld.

Wakako Kaku’s verse, narrated from the point of view of one of the great primeval
goddesses of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), continues the tone of
welcome of the previous poems, but rather than an individual welcoming others,
her narrator is a goddess whose body is a volcano, and she welcomes the
destructive lava that flows through her. (Kumamoto
is located nearby Mount Aso, an active volcano
that still spews rocks and poison gas on a daily basis.) Leading on from this,
Yasuhiro Yotsumoto took the image of flowing red and shifted perspective
radically, writing about a woman who, fearing she was pregnant, welcomes the
menstruation that she feels beginning as she watches a diorama of an erupting
volcano in the Mount Aso museum. In this way,
themes and images passed from poet to poet in the first round of poems as each
one stepped out on stage, performed their own improvisational riff, and then
stepped back again into the background to accompany the next person as they
took the lead in directing the progress of the improvisation. By the time these
five verses had been completed, the series of poems had arrived at a place that
most likely none of the individual poets could have predicted at the
outset.

Except for the first few verses, which were done by e-mail, most of the work
was conducted in intense bursts of writing while sitting together in a coffee
shop named Orange in Kumamoto. The process involved a great deal
of consultation as we discussed the finer points of the poems, debated whether
or not one verse was too close to another that followed, and considered
potential translations for certain phrases. (On these matters, the sabakite,
Shuntarō Tanikawa, had the final say.) Much like the renga sessions of old,
which often involved bursts of creative output between delicious food, saké and
baths in hot springs,
we punctuated our writing with meals together, excursions to local sites and
drinks in the evening. The result was an intense spirit of camaraderie and
cooperation, especially as the days wore on and we had to begin working at an
increasingly frenetic pace to finish the thirty verses we had agreed upon in
advance.

Of the various approaches to writing, Itō’s was perhaps the most striking.
Rather than penning her own original words for this project, all of her verses
consisted of quotations, which she selected with deliberation and care. Her
goal, she explained, was to try to find ways to use the voice of others to
present her own – an intertextual move that introduced an additional element of
collaboration within the renshi. In a brilliant metapoetic moment at the beginning
of verse number 27, Yotsumoto humorously comments on Itō’s use of quotations,
noting that although she relied upon quotations through to the very end, Itō
had revealed her own individual personality through them, much as a
shape-shifting tanuki accidentally reveals its tail.

After completing thirty verses, on 10 March, we gathered for a public reading
of the poems in front of a packed auditorium. All of the seats had been sold
out for over a mouth, the audience drawn by the impressive constellation of
famous poets that had come to cooperate in the project. The spectators were
rapt as we read our work and discussed the links between verses. One highlight
of the performance came at the end of the presentation. In verse 13, Tanikawa
had described a young actress who, after playing the role of a mute on stage,
goes home singing. In verse 14, Yotsumoto had written the lyrics of the song he
imagined her to be singing. Kaku is an accomplished musician and composer, and
when she was not busy writing her own verses for the renshi, she volunteered to
compose a song to accompany the lyrics. At the end of the reading, Kaku and
Yotsumoto performed the song, she with her guitar and him singing for all he
was worth. It was a rousing moment, and not surprisingly, the audience went
wild, cheering for the great collaborative gift these poets had given them.
Three cheers for renshi!

[N.B. Originally published in Poetry
International Rotterdam 2010. See
also Jerome Rothenberg’s account, “A Round of Renshi” posted in three
installments (2012) on Poems and Poetics.]

1 comment:

A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]